Posted
by
timothyon Saturday March 20, 2010 @04:20PM
from the save-up-for-neural-implants dept.

NotesSensei writes "My kids are learning Chinese in school. While the grammar is drop-dead simple, writing is a challenge since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters. I would like to know any good techniques (using technology or not) to help memorize large amounts of information, especially Chinese characters. Most of the stuff I Googled only helps on learning speaking."

Flashcards are great for learning Chinese or Japanese characters. There are also many characters, or parts thereof, that have a mnemonic relationship to the idea that they are used to impart. I can't think of any decent books offhand, but they're out there.

Flashcards aren't that great for me. The way I learn is by writing characters down on a piece of paper while thinking deeply about the pronunciation. Everybody learns in a slightly different way, a fact that I think is a little unusual.

Anki is based on an algorithm that reminds you of material just before you will have forgotten it, called the Forgetting Curve. The more times you are reminded, the stronger the pathways in the brain become and the easier it is to recall later. This algorithm was pioneered by a Polish man and implemented in a system called SuperMemo. You can read more about the inventor and his system in this great Wired article: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak

Thank you, thank you, thank you. You have pointed me to a wealth of information. At bare minimum, it will save me at least $50 in entertainment paperback purchases, since I'll spend at least that much time reading where that site has led me.

Also, the Wozniak who made the system isn't the Apple guy. I know you know, but I say that for the benefit of others.

nciku.com an online flashcard learning site just for Chinese, with handwriting recognition to boot. It's also from my experience the most thorough online english chinese dictionary, with both audio and lots of example sentences.

Flashcards are one thing that does not always do better in a digital form. Sure, use them on a computer, but also have dead tree format for when you're commuting or just happen to have a few minutes to practice.

I still much prefer the dead-tree type. Have not yet found a nice flashcard-maker program, that'll let you let you create the cards front and back and then print them out double-sided on a sheet of paper (several cards on one page so you'll cut it up into individual cards with scissors). Searching through the already entered vocabulary would be nice too. Suggestions anyone (pref. Linux)?

I also highly recommend Skritter if your goal is writing characters. Use an SRS program for reading, and Skritter for writing.

However, to budget your time, you should decide the relative importance of reading, writing, speaking and listening. In a language like Chinese, there is only limited overlap between each of these skills. A learner can be great at reading, but totally unable to speak or listen. Or, he can be great in conversation, but totally illiterate. You may also want to rethink the importance of

I feel like your post might be sarcastic, but I don't think it is. If it is you suck at sarcasm, sorry.

Actually, computers are rather bad at language translation. Handwritten and printed characters are presented with such stylistic variation that even the simplest aspect, optical recognition, is very difficult. Hell, even high-grade OCR software for roman character sets is still imperfect. And then there's translation. Some characters have both multiple meanings and multiple pronunciations, most of which is

I believe that you mean that software is rather bad at translation, computers are good at memorization. Using computers to handle the memorization frees us to explore software and human intelligence to do translation without the burden of memorization.

I use a five-point scale for machine translation. Level one is individual words and kanji. Level two is phrases and sentences. Level three is paragraphs and paragraph

that statement is like saying that no calculator can bring the mental satisfaction that comes from successfully multiplying two ten-digit numbers in Middle school arithmetic class.

If computers couldn't multiply at that point, it'd be a valid analogy. That statement about the "wonder of the human mind" wasn't about "mental satisfaction", it was about the fact that right now, the human mind can do translation much more accurately than computers are, and you wouldn't trust a computer to do that job.

You know how much more money you can make being bilingual, especially in languages from radically different parts of the world?

Most people who are smart don't do things to make other people think they're smart. They do them because they're fun, interesting, challenging, career-building, and/or personally fulfilling. They get the same joy out of it that you do fucking beautiful girls while stoned out of your mind.

The translating computer you have? Built by smart people who didn't waste

No two languages can be more different than English and Lao. Mastering both is serious intellectual accomplishment.

But here in Beaverton Oregon it is the standard practice of companies that operate in the vast Southeast Asian community to pay employees fifty cents an hour more if they are fluent in both English and one or more Southeast Asian languages.

Yes, I do know how much more money you can make by being bilingual in radically different languages. You make 50 cents an hour more than the people who onl

First and foremost, you can't synthesize facts you don't know. As an example, someone recently hired me to sort through five thousand bounced emails and figure out how to turn them into a spreadsheet containing the actual failed email addresses.

In order to do this, I had him put it on an IMAP server (the last time he asked me to do this, it was already). I then connected to it with a Ruby script using an IMAP library, parsed the relevant messages (moving each message I succe

I'm learning Chinese right now too and I use http://www.nciku.com and put in all my vocabulary from each lesson and just continuously test myself every day on the vocab I'm learning and have learned to always keep it fresh in my mind. I think you're really at a loss here to do anything other than just practice, practice, practice as, like you said, there's no correlation between characters and sounds.

Almost 5 years together, and she still hardly speaks a word of German because I almost automatically switch over to English when talking to her......which may be good for my English, but certainly isn't for her German...:-/

Doesn't work. I'm married to one and that hasn't helped my Chinese much. We stick to talking English to each other (our common language, a foreign language for both of us). Living in Hong Kong however that helps. And I have taken classes, that also helped me a lot. So by now I can have a simple conversation in Chinese. Well that is as long as I don't venture out too far, Cantonese is spoken mostly in Guangdong province ("only" about 300 mln people), and I don't speak Mandarin. Mostly useless to me.

There are ideographic relationships between concepts and what's in the characters. Each of the elements in complex characters bears some of the meaning of the word. Dictionaries for Chinese and Japanese Kanji are in fact organized in this manner (by character radical). I can't recommend a particular manner of memorizing them (i failed abysmally at the task as a child, and am functionally illiterate as a result), however the relationships are there if you want to look for them.

There are ideographic relationships between concepts and what's in the characters. Each of the elements in complex characters bears some of the meaning of the word. Dictionaries for Chinese and Japanese Kanji are in fact organized in this manner (by character radical). I can't recommend a particular manner of memorizing them (i failed abysmally at the task as a child, and am functionally illiterate as a result), however the relationships are there if you want to look for them.

I also have studied Chinese as a child and Japanese as an adult, neither to a fluent level, and can vouch for the parent's suggestion to look at components during study. That's about half of Heisig's method, which other posters have mentioned, the other half being to not worry about pronunciation until you've first learned the meaning of many characters. (Aside: plenty of people vouch for Heisig, plenty criticise it too; I don't know of any studies showing that it really works, only anecdotes from individua

Yes, Chinese dictionaries are mostly organized by pinyin alphabetical order, but there are always look-up tables organized by radicals, and sometimes by stroke count, in order to be able to find a character for which you don't know the pronunciation.

Wouldn't this be something you could get best from their teachers? Not that there's anything wrong with asking Google or Slashdot, but the first place I would go is to their teachers. One would think - or at least hope - that they would have additional tools they could give you to help your kids study.

... Not that there's anything wrong with asking Google or Slashdot, but the first place I would go is to their teachers....

Yes, but where do good teachers get their "additional tools"? There are a couple of places. (1) They go online. If they can do it, you can too. (2) They watch and see what their students and parents come up with. When they recognize a good idea, they'll perpetuate it. For this to work, some students and parents need to do independent research. (3) They use what they were taught with. (4) They receive teacher oriented marketing. Most of it is junk (as with all marketing), but there are nuggets there

I taught English to kids in Africa, and found very few natural connections between English sounds and letters. One of the few techniques that worked decently was to pick some words that could be formed into the letter. For example, the letter "k" can be drawn as a key. It's not great, but it makes a connection that otherwise wouldn't exist. If your kids are picking up words well enough, this might be useful. Good luck.

Yes, there is no reason a K is pronounced like a K. You can make up mnemonics, but it's just an abstract shape. There are only 26 to learn (56 if you include capitals, which can bare resemblance to the lower case versions).

I've been trying to learn Japanese and this effects me too. I learned Katakana and Hiragana pretty easily, using little mnemonics and memory tricks (Kana Pict-o-Graphics [amazon.com] is amazing), and so the alphabets are easy to learn and retain. There are only about 100 in total, plus a few combina

Flashcards. I would have never gotten through grade school math without them. I have terrible ( self-diagnosed ) ADD, procrastination, and aversion to doing anything difficult and repetitive. Math was beyond me. I would have flunked out of grade school if my mom hadn't sat me down with the flash cards every night.

you'll find that some though not all Chinese words are meaning-sound combinations: for instance, many words that are pronounced "zhong" have one radical that is also pronounced "zhong" by itself though perhaps in a different tone.

My wife and I have had success with making our own flashcards, each with a different character or compound word.

I've been studying Japanese for years, and flashcard software has really helped me with the Chinese characters. iFlash for OSX is an excellent tool.

As others have said, there's no way around the need for repetition and a lot of practice.

Also, diligence is extremely important. If you're not using them, then you forget the characters very quickly. If you're not careful you might actually find that you're forgetting characters as quickly as you're learning new ones.

When learning kanji, I found that mnemonics were far and away the easiest way to remember all of those otherwise arbitrary Chinese characters. If you make flash cards similar to what you find at http://kanjidamage.com/howto [kanjidamage.com] and go through them every day, you'll plow through them at a steady pace. The mnemonic in that example incorporates the English meaning, pronunciation, and component radicals all in one sentence. If you can remember that sentence and recognize at least one of those components, it becomes easy to figure out the rest.

This is wrong. Many, if not most, Chinese characters give an indication to both meaning and pronunciation. For instance the Mandarin word for "same" is pronounced "tong". The Mandarin word for copper is also "tong", and the ideogram for copper contains two radicals: the "metal" radical, which indicates meaning, and the "same" radical, which indicates pronunciation.

Once you learn the basic radicals, learning Chinese characters is not that hard. I can read Chinese much better than I can speak it.

Flash cards work well. Some computer programs work well too. "Rosetta Stone" works really well, but it is expensive.

I like how people purpose mnemonic techniques and everything for remembering the Chinese characters, when they're composed of relatively simple characters. Sure there are 214 radicals, and some chars without radicals, but seriously, remembering that a word is composed of "tree tree cover" is like remembering that "marajuana" has a "j" that is pronounced like an "h" because it's from Spanish.

So much of this confusion about Chinese characters is because they're so opaque, and no one seems to bother to teach

It's more problematic for Japanese because there is no way to guess the reading from the radicals and there are many more readings than with Mandarin. One word may use the Tang dynasty reading whereas another the Ming reading for the same character. Throw in the native Japanese and it becomes a chore to remember everything.

The precise problem with how East-Asian languages are taught is rote memorization. They present you with a character and simply say "this means language", and it's pronounced "go".

Likewise, Japanese tends to teach by patterns. Example: "*owner* wa *object* ga arimasu" means "owner has an/the object". Then later, they say "in order to say that someone has done something, use the pattern: *doer* wa *action in informal case* no ga arimasu."

The problem with this, is that people don't realize that the "no" particle above is being used to turn a sentence into a noun phrase, and you're simply saying literally, "the person has that action", the same as if you were saying that they have an object.

We present these languages, and scripts as if the only way to learn them is through rote memorization...

This is wrong. Many, if not most, Chinese characters give an indication to both meaning and pronunciation. For instance the Mandarin word for "same" is pronounced "tong". The Mandarin word for copper is also "tong", and the ideogram for copper contains two radicals: the "metal" radical, which indicates meaning, and the "same" radical, which indicates pronunciation.

Once you learn the basic radicals, learning Chinese characters is not that hard. I can read Chinese much better than I can speak it.

James W. Heisig, a researcher at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, Japan, has released an excellent set of books for memorizing Japanese Kanji, traditional Chinese Hanzi, and simplified Chinese Hanzi:

While this technique focuses on memorizing the meaning of the characters (and how to write them yourself) and not so much on the readings of them, I've found it an absolutely invaluable technique for doing the former. I have an abysmal memory to the point that it's shocking, and yet using his techniques, I was able to easily memorize the meaning of about 400 characters and how to write them in a couple of weeks with only a couple of hours of dedication a day, which I was very impressed with. His technique is based on building up from simple radicals and employing visual memory to make everything stick in place, which basically means concocting an elaborate and often ridiculous story for each character to tie the correct radicals into their correct places. The story is usually so silly that it cannot be forgotten, which is, IMO, in where the trick lies. As your skill in recall develops, you can let go of the stories and move to natural recall.

Also, the use of timed memorization software is essential when we're talking about this amount of information. Here are two great free software packages for this that were largely based specifically at learning Japanese (and thus are quite suitable for other languages, especially Chinese):

(Personally, I prefer Mnemosyne a bit more, even though Anki has many more features, but this is because I'm making a set of cards to memorize all of Heisig's Kanji, traditional Hanzi, and simplified Hanzi, and I'm using HTML tables to store all the information. Mnemosyne preserves my HTML exactly, whereas Anki futzes with it and ruins the formatting.)

I started studying Chinese in September too and I'm trying a lot of techniques to memorize it quickly and efficiently.

As others have already mentioned, Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/) is the way to go for memorizing vocabulary, as it uses a psychological algorithm that helps you repeating things as often as you need to. If you then install the pinyin toolkit plugin for learning chinese it's the best thing to learn chinese vocabulary as it imports all your translations, pinyin and even sounds automatically when you just enter the Hanzi.

This pinyin toolkit also uses a nice colour system for the tones. Basically, every character is displayed in a color depending on its tone:
red = first tone
orange = second tone
green = third tone
blue = fourth tone
black = no tone

You can go even further and WRITE the characters in those colors when practicing. The tones of each character will stay in your memory WAY better!

Another tip when trying to memorize chinese characters: try to grasp the meaning of their components and learning to read and write them will be way more easy. You can use sites like nciku.com or archchinese.com where characters are split up in their components. However, you won't find everything there.
There's also an extremely good book called "Learning Chinese Characters" (http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X/) - it teaches you the 800 most common chinese characters by telling you everything about their components and even giving you stories to remember the components of each character. It's by far the best book I've found for learning how to write chinese.

I've also seen it said (in a comment on here perhaps?) that it is preferable not to use pinyin romanisation as that doesn't help as much with making the correct sounds. Whatever it was pointed at GR [wikipedia.org] as an alternative. Don't take that as gospel though as I may have no idea what I'm talking

I've been picking up some Japanese recently, via podcasts, torrented mp3s and the like but learning Kanji above Grade 1 isn't going too well. This is largely because I never get to use it in real life. My suggestion to pick up Kanki/Chinese Characters is to associate the symbol with the actual object. For instance, to learn the Kanji for "shoe" write the Kanji on a sticker and put it in your shoe, or all your shoes. That way, every time you put your shoe on, you will be reminded of the Kanji. Do this for ev

The complicated-looking characters are actually built out of smaller, standardized parts. If your kids want to be able to look up characters in a dictionary, they're going to have to learn to recognize the more common Kangxi radicals [wikipedia.org] anyway. The 7 most common radicals are used in about 10,000 characters. Most characters [wikipedia.org] are formed by combining a semantic part with a phonetic part. Once you learn a bunch of these, it makes it much easier to remember words made out of them. Lots of words are actually compoun

one of the key reasons why the chinese don't need a large intelligence agency is because their entire population is actually their intelligence agency, having been trained from a very young age to memorise vast amounts of information - for example, the 10,000 or so chinese characters.

tony buzan's memetic learning techniques were the first popularly re-published discovery of the greek "mnemonic" memorisation techniques, and he adapted them to get you to focus on the use of the five senses and "familiar" or powerful emotive things, such as "home" or "naked person" or "funny picture" as "hooks" on which to hang the sequence to memorise.

the use of such "hooks" was well-known in medieval times. if you look closely at the top and bottom of the bayeux tapestry, there's a continuous but very small row of naked people in various sexual poses and performing various acts. the idea is that if you want to memorise the battle of hastings, and what happened, you get yourself all worked up "wha-heey!!" and _then_ you look at the pictures of the battle, and the pictures sink in.

daniel tennet, aka "brainman" has also developed a similar sort of technique, focussing specifically on helping people to memorise languages. daniel is approaching this from a different angle from tony buzan, however: optimising the actual language learning process.

tony's technique of "hooking" first gets you to associate numbers with familiar or exciting things. for example, the number 1 could be "red post box". the number 2 looks like a swan. 4 a sail-boat etc. etc. but you can equally as well use what works best for you (kinesthetics) - smells, movements, touch etc. it's _entirely_ up to you to use the right "hooks" which are appropriate for _you_.

so, you now have your "hooks". to memorise things by numbers, let's say the number sequence 412, you imagine a sail-boat on a lake, and it goes past a red postbox, and there's a huuuge white swan sitting on top of it. voila, you have just memorised the sequence 412. this technique of picture/thought association gives you the ability to memorise absolutely huge sequences which you otherwise thought you were incapable of.

so, if you were to use tony's technique, you would look at the character in one of two ways:

1) see what the picture reminds you of (for example, tree is blindingly obvious: it looks like a tree) and then "hook" that in, in some imaginative way, with the actual object (as other people have suggested here)

2) decompile the character by brush-strokes, both the sequence of the strokes (which is critically important for chinese calligraphy) and the direction, length and position, and assign each stroke's direction and position a numerical (or other sequence). you then cross-reference that numerical sequence against the "hooks". you also cross-reference the actual meaning at the beginning of the sequence, again in some imaginative way.

by recalling the pictures / hooks, one after the other, you can turn them back into numbers. you then turn the numbers back into brush strokes: voila, you have your chinese character.

it's a lot of initial work, setting up the "hooks" that are appropriate and creating the mnemonic interpretation, but if you're serious, you'll do it.

all that having been said: it would be much much easier to do sanskrit. if you look closely at the written form of sanskrit, you'll notice that the actual written language - the brush strokes - are a _phonetic key_ to the pronounciation! a vertical line means "plosive" (as in - you're going to close your mouth in some fashion). a horizontal line means "make your voice-box resonate". a slash on top going top-left to bottom-right means "close mouth" and a slash on top going bottom-left to top-right means "open mouth", thus you get "taaah" and "aaahht" respectively when combined with the horizontal and vertical lines. various curly-bits mean "do different things with tongue" and thus you get "kuhh", "puhh", "tuhh", "buhh" or "aabh", "aaakh", "aahhp" if the dia

The non-radical part is often pronounced the same in multiple characters it appears, particularly for newer words or characters. This happened in older times, too. But pronunciations diverged with time, particularly after the Mongols mangled the northern dialect. I can often guess the pronunciation of character I havent seen.
Unfortunately, I dont know if there a way to teach this. You just observe the sound patterns as you learn characters.

ReadTheKanji.com is a -great- site for learning to read Japanese words. It is the single best thing to help me read Japanese that I've found, and I've spent a lot of time looking. I even thought about writing my own version, but other than some fairly minor features that I'm not ready for yet, I can't improve on it.

And not just the radical (dictionary lookup) part. I wish all my teachers had named the parts from the start. But you gradually learn their names. Then you sort of remember character X is made up of the water and water and po-sounding part and so on.
After a while you dont think of parts, but the "gestalt" or entirety. Same thing happens in English reading. You see the whole word, its length, the ascending and descending parts, the first and final letters. Theres a trick text going around where the i

Having studied eight foreign languages (French, Spanish, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Japanese, and Finnish) in my life, and after talking this theory over with friends who have attained fluency in some really different languages (e.g. Spanish and Bahasa Melayu), I feel safe in stating this here in pretty strong terms:

The only way to learn a language is to use it.

The only sort of "classroom" language class that works worth a damn is an immersion class, in which during the class period you do not speak any language other than the one you're studying. Even classroom instructions ("Open your book to page 23") are in the language, once you've learned numerals.

The worst language classes I've taken have been ones in which the foreign language being studied is treated as a matter of abstract grammar and vocabulary to be memorized, not used... and in which the teacher spends most of their time telling anecdotes in English about their experiences in the culture in question. I took two years of Russian in high school and a year of it in college -- and forgot more Russian than I learned in that last year, since the teacher spent the class time telling stories (in English!) about run-ins with the KGB, instead of helping us practice speaking and reading Russian.

As regards Chinese: I've never studied Chinese, but I have studied Japanese including kanji, albeit only to the extent of a couple hundred kanji. The above applies fully to kanji, and I expect it applies to hanzi (Chinese characters) as well -- in order to learn them, you have to use them. Write them. Come up with silly sentences and write those. Don't just use flash cards and memorization; come up with things that you want to say in Chinese (even if just to be silly) and say those things with hanzi.

The other half of the equation, of course, is to get someone who is fluent to respond to your crude childish attempts at speaking and writing. That's the point of a good language class: you get to make the sort of errors that a little kid makes, and they correct you. That method of language acquisition works for little kids, and it works for adults too if they're willing to be childish for a while.

Chinese characters aren't just pictures. Rather, they consist of about 200 radicals that are combined 2, 3, and 4 at a time. Many characters consist of just two parts: a sound indicator and a meaning indicator. There are plenty of books explaining this and using these relationships to help make Chinese characters easier to learn (look on Amazon).

There is a great children's book, "The Chinese word for Horse and other stories" by John Lewis ( http://www.librarything.com/work/1564984 [librarything.com] )which shows the structure of some (very few) Chinese characters. (Charles E. Tuttle co. published a small paperback that illustrated some basic Kanji in the same way, but I can't find my copy and I can't remember the name.) Look for a Chinese calligraphy guide that describes the meaning of the radicals as derived from pictures and you will be well on your way to binding

You're right on the money. They call the complexity of a writing system's form-sound relationship orthographic depth [wikipedia.org]. English is a deep language, Chinese is deeper, Japanese is deeper still. Spanish on the other hand is orthographically shallow. So it's considered easier to learn to read and write in Spanish, than English, in English than Chinese, in Chinese than Japanese.

that's pretty interesting. I'd guess that the phonetic part of japanese (hiragana & katakana) is probably even shallower than spanish tho.

Exactly. It's only the kanji script which makes the Japanese writing system as a whole deep. You take an already deep writing system from one language (Chinese), smush it over the top of an existing spoken language (native Japanese), salt it by borrowing pronunciations from the first language during three or four historic periods (i.e. different dialects), and you get a very weak relationship between the sounds you're saying and the glyphs you're writing, at least compared to other languages.

I've studied Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, and now Dari. The thing that has helped me the most has been to read children's books. I start out with the ones intended for kindergartners, and work my way up. Once I get halfway decent, I start on newspapers. These days you can find online newpapers in just about any language.

When I was in college a second language was still mandatory to graduate. Basically this meant at the time that you have to pass one full class in a non-English language. Today I don't believe a second language is mandatory any more, and 20 years before I was in school, it was four years of a second language or no diploma, sonny.

Anyway, I took French like I had for four years in High School (we could also take German at our school, it was a bit easier to learn).

Characters are a bitch, no way around it. Your kids will have to dedicate a large chunk of their time to learning reading and writing in Chinese. After that it's a continuous chore to retain that knowledge, especially in writing. After several years study, it can seem like you're set to the Sisyphean task of building a mountain out of sand--focus on building up the peak with new knowledge and other memories decay. That said, there are a billion plus living examples it can be done, and there are things that

I wonder what is the relationship between what "A" looks like and its sound?

The way to learn Chinese characters is through repetitive writing in addition to learning what each radical means. Each character learned/day needs to be written at least 100 times. There is also a standard way to write most characters, top-down then left-right. Prepare for sore hands and fingers. At least people outside China would probably write the characters in Latin order on a page--left-to-right then top down instead of top do

I'm amazed no one has mentioned SuperMemo [supermemo.com]. It's based on an actual scientific theory of how to optimize the value of memorization effort. There's a Chinese character library [super-memo.com] for it already.

Ok, I know what you meant, but "relation between sound and shape of the characters" suggests to me something along the lines of the following: "see, o and u have this rounded shape, so you should round your lips when you make the corresponding sound; b, d, t, d, and k all have these big straight lines sticking out of them like spears sticking out of dead bodies, which suggest the violence of a plosive consonant."

Immerse yourself in the language. Write it and speak it every day. For some, this means living in the country; for others, date someone whose native language is the one you're trying to learn (and who doesn't have any other language in common with you; for example, my girlfriend speaks English, but my Chinese is much better than her English, so we always speak Chinese to each other, as it feels much more natural).

But yeah, do anything and everything that increases exposure. Flash cards are just one way.

I loved tokenshi's response:-)
My experience is fairly limited, but here are the things that helped me:

Practicing the strokes makes a huge difference in learning speed. My tutor provided me with a workbook that had pictures of the characters displaying the order and direction of the strokes, and I was asked to trace the characters at least 10 times each before copying them down. It seems monotonous at first, but pretty soon I built a frame of reference. The strokes became more familiar (even developing

There is an online comic called Sinfest that occasionally has "cartoon-to-calligraphy" transformations that are interesting.

If you go to the archive [sinfest.net] and search for "calligraphy", you can pull up all the relevant strips. They will make more sense if you're a regular reader. Also, I probably wouldn't suggest using these for kids, but if you were creative, you could probably come up with similar types of drawings on your own.

For those three of you who haven't seen it yet, http://hanzismatter.com/ [hanzismatter.com] is the canonical site for idiotic people getting themselves permanently tattooed with a language that they don't understand.

Because the writing system is ridiculous. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French lit

I think what he means is that the same characters can be used for unrelated sounds in Chinese. At least in English, you can get close by writing phonetically, but in Chinese there's no equivalent. At least as far as I'm aware.

That is true in Japanese, but much less common in Chinese. Chinese generally has a single one-syllable pronunciation for each glyph, though grammar rules can change the tone of character in a given word. There can also be several glyphs which share a single pronunciation (homonyms): there are more characters in Chinese than there are possible phoneme combinations (given the rules of the language for constructing syllables).

There a handful of characters that have different pronunciations in different contexts. For example the last characters of yinyue (music) and kuaile (happy) are the same, although in the first word it is pronounced "yue" while in the other it is "le". There are a couple others like that I've come across, but I hear it is more common in Japanese.

This is SO much more common in Japanese. See, the Japanese had a widespread spoken language long before they had a widespread written language. When travels to China resulted in "borrowing" the Chinese written language, many of the Chinese pronunciations were brought with them. But the Japanese pronunciations weren't tossed out. So most kanji characters in Japanese have a Chinese (onyomi) pronunciation and a Japanese (kunyomi) pronunciation.

According to an article on linguistics I read some years ago when I was in college, while Chinese characters do often carry a meaning, they are just as important for their sound. The Chinese language and its characters are considered morphemic, however, even though the truth is that the situation is very much a hybrid one.

IIRC, Chinese characters represent individual syllables. English letters are strung together to make syllables. I think he's lamenting that syllables in English that sound similar will generally look similar, but there is no such resemblance in Chinese.

Links can be a bit weird in Chinese. FIrst example you're likely to come across is ma. Ma (third tone) means horse. Toneless ma is a particle that changes a sentence into a question. The character for the particle is the character for horse with a mouth (kou) next to it, showing that it's a part of speech, and that it sounds like the word for horse.

Several Chinese friends of mine assure me that there are links between meaning/sound and character for all of them, via these 'radicals', but it's a bit too Time

I'm no expert on this, but I don't see a relation between sound and shape of our letters either. So the answer is to study as hard as you can and also: repetition!

We've basically got 26 characters to worry about (plus numbers, punctuation marks and various symbols). To be literate in Chinese, you have to know 3-4 thousand characters--and there are tens of thousands of characters in all. There are also two different sets of characters, simplified and traditional. So while neither have any relationship to sound, memorizing any alphabet is a hell of a lot easier.

You've got the same amount of total information to memorize no matter what when it comes to learning a new language. Any type of writing system has its advantages and disadvantages, though. When you're using an alphabet, it's true that once you know the letters you will be able to pronounce any word that you come across, but you probably won't have any idea what it means. When you're using ideographs, such as in Chinese, you'll probably have a pretty good idea what a new character means, but not how to p

When you're using an alphabet, it's true that once you know the letters you will be able to pronounce any word that you come across

Not a chance in English. There are loads of rules involving combinations of letters (ce, ge, kn etx). There are loads of letters and letter combinations that don't have a set pronunciation (th, ough, etc). There are at least hundreds of downright exceptions to all the rules (get, acknowledge, etc). To learn English well, you need to memorise _all_ of these, and many of the

Since English borrows from so many other languages, these exceptions are what confuse someone who is a native Chinese speaker, for example. In addition, English contains words that are spelled and sound the same but have different meanings. Chinese, not so much--lots of characters that sound the same but have different glyphs.

You've got the same amount of total information to memorize no matter what when it comes to learning a new language.

I don't agree with this.You could learn Mandarin entirely with pinyin--grammar and vocabulary. Pinyin is the most common method of transliteration for Chinese, and consists of a good chunk of the alphabet with some additional markers for tones (similar to accent markers in French). But you could learn it in a couple of days to a week, even if you didn't know the alphabet.

However, if you learn Mandarin using the Chinese script, you have to learn thousands of characters on top of that. Not only do you have to learn the characters, but you have to learn the stroke order and the stroke count (which is used to look up characters in a dictionary). This is substantially more information.

In all human languages the number of ideas is roughly the same (except for English, which has 450K curse words in addition). Foreigners learning English (I am one) struggle to learn the correct sequence of letters that produces the word in English corresponding to a particular abstraction. You struggle to learn the particular sequence of chicken scratch th

While I suppose you COULD learn Chinese only with Pinyin, I can't imagine how painful that would be, and you'd never be able to read anything or be considered remotely literate. Probably why they never changed to pinyin.

Anyway, most of the comments here seem to be related learning to read, which in Chinese is a much easier task than writing. I can read newspapers just fine, but I gave up trying to memorize exactly how to write each c

While I suppose you COULD learn Chinese only with Pinyin, I can't imagine how painful that would be, and you'd never be able to read anything or be considered remotely literate. Probably why they never changed to pinyin.

Well of course it is painful if you omit the tones.

Or perhaps you meant the (IMHO) unusually high number of homophones, which makes Pinyin unsuitable for any remotely advanced text.

Words in Japanese dictionaries are generally organized by radical. To use the Kanjidamage example again, look at http://kanjidamage.com/howto [kanjidamage.com] and note the components of that kanji. In that example, "bury" would be listed along with other "earth" kanji. There are a couple hundred basic kanji that you'll need to learn, but essentially all other kanji are composed primarily of some combination of those more basic ones. For example, you can see that not only is "bury" made up of the kanji for "earth" and "v

One common way in many dictionaries to look up unfamiliar characters is by first identifying a common component of the character known as a radical then count how many additional strokes are required to write the character. Then you can look up the radical and number of strokes in a table and find the character you want in the dozen or so possibilities listed. This is more difficult then looking in an alphabetical dictionary though, sometimes it's not obvious what radical a character is under.

Paper dictionaries usually have something called a radical index, where you find the character by its main feature and the number of additional strokes. But the best solution is to use more modern technology - various online and mobile dictionaries have a feature that lets you draw characters with your mouse, touchscreen etc and looks them up for you. The best one for Chinese is nciku.com [nciku.com]; another dictionary with that feature is mdbg.net [mdbg.net], but that one needs you to get the correct stroke order, which you mig

Use an electronic dictionary, with character recognition. This way you can just write the character on the screen and it will look it up. I have that on my phone (Pleco on Windows Mobile) and it is a life-saver. I like to browse a good old paper dictionary from time to time, but the radical system is just too slow for real life use. This way I have been able to read real stuff much sooner, and it is much more interesting and rewarding than language learning texts.

In all latin-based languages there is a phonetic alphabet only. This alphabet is made up of letters based on phonetic sounds. Using these phonetic letters and basic grammar rules you can correctly read any written word, whether you know what it means or not. You can then use a reference to find said words and look up their meaning.

In other words, the shape represents a specific sound (or set of sounds). Knowing the letters in the alphabet also means you know how to pronounce the words written in that al

And I tried to illustrate it on an earlier message in this thread but unfortunately Slashdot does NOT support double-byte Unicode and I couldn't post that very useful trick my Chinese language teacher taught me.

Just start using the romanized Japanese word for it whenever you need the subtle meaning. If you're using it in technical documentation, put a footnote the first time you use it. English doesn't care about linguistic purity or any of that nonsense.